In order to describe the logic of morality, "contractualist" philosophers have studied how individuals behave when they choose to follow their moral intuitions. These individuals, contractualists note, often act as if they have bargained and thus reached an agreement with others about how to distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation. Using this observation, such philosophers argue that the purpose of morality is to maximize the benefits of human interaction. The resulting "contract" analogy is both insightful and puzzling. On (...) one hand, it captures the pattern of moral intuitions, thus answering questions about human cooperation: why do humans cooperate? Why should the distribution of benefits be proportionate to each person's contribution? Why should the punishment be proportionate to the crime? Why should the rights be proportionate to the duties? On the other hand, the analogy provides a mere as-if explanation for human cooperation, saying that cooperation is "as if" people have passed a contract-but since they didn't, why should it be so? To evolutionary thinkers, the puzzle of the missing contract is immediately reminiscent of the puzzle of the missing "designer" of life-forms, a puzzle that Darwin's theory of natural selection essentially resolved. Evolutionary and contractualist theory originally intersected at the work of philosophers John Rawls and David Gauthier, who argued that moral judgments are based on a sense of fairness that has been naturally selected. In this book, Nicolas Baumard further explores the theory that morality was originally an adaptation to the biological market of cooperation, an arena in which individuals competed to be selected for cooperative interactions. In this environment, Baumard suggests, the best strategy was to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation in a fair way, so that those who offered less than others were left out of cooperation while those who offered more were exploited by their partners. It is with this evolutionary approach that Baumard ultimately accounts for the specific structure of human morality. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a morally good person? It can be tempting to think that it is simply a matter of performing certain actions and avoiding others. And yet there is much more to moral character than our outward actions. We expect a good person to not only behave in certain ways but also to experience the world in certain ways within.

Artificial intelligence and robots may progressively take a more and more prominent place in our daily environment. Interestingly, in the study of how humans perceive these artificial entities, science has mainly taken an anthropocentric perspective (i.e., how distant from humans are these agents). Considering people’s fears and expectations from robots and artificial intelligence, they tend to be simultaneously afraid and allured to them, much as they would be to the conceptualisations related to the divine entities (e.g., gods). In two experiments, (...) we investigated the proximity of representation between artificial entities (i.e., artificial intelligence and robots), divine entities and natural entities (i.e., humans and other animals) at both an explicit (Study 1) and an implicit level (Study 2). In the first study, participants evaluated these entities explicitly on positive and negative attitudes. Hierarchical clustering analysis showed that participants’ representation of artificial intelligence, robots and divine entities were similar, while the representation of humans tended to be associated with that of animals. In the second study, participants carried out a word/non-word decision task including religious semantic-related words and neutral words after the presentation of a masked prime referring to divine entities, artificial entities and natural entities (or a control prime). Results showed that after divine and artificial entity primes, participants were faster to identify religious words as words compared to neutral words arguing for a semantic activation. We conclude that people make sense of the new entities by relying on already familiar entities and in the case of artificial intelligence and robots, people appear to draw parallels to divine entities. (shrink)

Recent models of the conceptual system hold that concepts are grounded in simulations of actual experiences with instances of those concepts in sensory-motor systems (e.g., Barsalou, 1999, 2003; Solomon & Barsalou, 2001). Studies supportive of such a viewhave shown that verifying a property of a concept in one modality, and then switching to verify a property of a different concept in a different modality generates temporal processing costs similar to the cost of switching modalities in perception. In addition to non-emotional (...) concepts, the present experiment investigated switching costs in verifying properties of positive and negative (emotional) concepts. Properties of emotional concepts were taken from vision, audition, and the affective system. Parallel to switching costs in neutral concepts, the study showed that for positive and negative concepts, verifying properties from different modalities produced processing costs such that reaction times were longer and error rates were higher. Importantly, this effect was observed when switching from the affective system to sensory modalities, and vice-versa. These results support the embodied cognition view of emotion in humans. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of Nicolas Malebranche's Treatise on Nature and Grace by Patrick Riley. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This longitudinal study investigated the capability of various positive psychological resources to directly or indirectly protect specific well-being outcomes and moderate the effects on well-being of health and economic threats in a lockdown situation during the 2020 health crisis in France. At the beginning of lockdown, participants completed self-assessment questionnaires to document their initial level of well-being and state of nine different well-established psychological resources, measured as traits: optimism, hope, self-efficacy, gratitude toward the world, self-transcendence, wisdom, gratitude of being, peaceful (...) disengagement, and acceptance. Three weeks later, a weekly follow-up was started to record changes in well-being and reported threats for a duration of 5 weeks. Results show that psychological resources efficiently protected well-being in a variety of ways: they buffered the adverse effects of reported threats to health and wealth, increased the well-being averages, and reduced the decline in well-being over time. More specifically, emotional well-being was positively predicted by hope, gratitude of being, and, to a lesser level, by acceptance; psychological well-being by self-efficacy, personal wisdom, and gratitude of being; social well-being only by gratitude toward the world; and inner well-being by optimism, gratitude of being, and acceptance. The study emphasizes the importance of cultivating psychological resources in ordinary times to protect individuals' well-being when difficult and extraordinary circumstances occur. It also offers clues to the kind of resources one may want to develop. (shrink)

In the past decade, experiments on altruistic punishment have played a central role in the study of the evolution of cooperation. By showing that people are ready to incur a cost to punish cheaters and that punishment help to stabilise cooperation, these experiments have greatly contributed to the rise of group selection theory. However, despite its experimental robustness, it is not clear whether altruistic punishment really exists. Here, I review the anthropological literature and show that hunter-gatherers rarely punish cheaters. Instead, (...) they avoid dealing with them and switch to other partners. I suggest that these data are better explained by individual selection, and in particular by partner choice models, in which individuals are in competition to be recruited by cooperative partners. I discuss two apparent problems for partner choice theories: large-scale cooperation and punishments in economic games. I suggest that rather than favouring group selection theory, these two phenomena provide evidence in favour of individual selection: (1) people produce large-scale cooperation through institutions in which punishment is not altruistic but rewarded on an individual basis; (2) punishment in experimental games can be explained without altruism and is indeed often better explained by individual interests. (shrink)

This paper intends to bring Austinian themes into methodological discussion about models. Using Austinian conceptual vocabulary, I argue that models perform actions in and outside of the academic field. This multiplicity of fields induces a variety of felicity conditions and types of performed actions. If for example, an inference from a model is judged according to some epistemological criteria in the scientific field, the representation of the world which the model carries will not be judged by the same criteria outside (...) the scientific field. A model can be considered as a standard in a strict scientific framework, while not being used as part of public policies, or vice versa. However, we focus on the dynamics between different fields. (shrink)

We present a new proof of soundness/completeness of tableaux with respect to dialogical games in Classical First-Order Logic. As far as we know it is the first thorough result for dialogical games where finiteness of plays is guaranteed by means of what we call repetition ranks.

High and low alexithymia scorers were confronted with a modified visual oddball task that allowed the study of categorical perception of emotional expressions on faces. Participants had to quickly detect a deviant (rare) morphed face that shared or did not share the same emotional expression as the frequent one. Expected categorical perception effects, which were also neurophysiologically indexed, showed that rare stimuli were detected faster if they depicted a different emotional expression compared to rare stimuli depicting the same emotional expression (...) than the frequent one. Even if no differences were observed at a behavioural level, high alexithymia scorers evidenced overall delayed neurophysiological responses in components related to the attentional processing of rare emotional faces. Moreover, the categorical perception effects for event-related components associated with the attentional processing were smaller in high alexithymia scorers and were even absent for anger. These results show that high alexithymia scorers present discrimination delays that are already observed at the attentional level. (shrink)

Punitive behaviours are often assumed to be the result of an instinct for punishment. This instinct would have evolved to punish wrongdoers and it would be the evidence that cooperation has evolved by group selection. Here, I propose an alternative theory according to which punishment is a not an adaptation and that there was no specific selective pressure to inflict costs on wrongdoers in the ancestral environment. In this theory, cooperation evolved through partner choice for mutual advantage. In the ancestral (...) environment, individuals were in competition to be recruited in cooperative ventures and it was vital to share the benefits of cooperation in a mutually advantageous manner. If individuals took a bigger share of the benefits, their partners would leave them for more interesting partners. If they took a smaller share, they would be exploited by their partners who would receive more than what they had contributed to produce. This competition led to the selection of a sense of fairness, a cognitive adaptation aiming to share equally the benefits of cooperation in order to attract partners. In this theory, punishment is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation. Punitive behaviours are only a way to restore fairness by compensating the victim or penalizing the culprit. Drawing on behavioural economics, legal anthropology, and cognitive psychology, I show that empirical data fit better with this framework than with the theory of group selection. When people punish, they do so to restore fairness rather than to help the group. (shrink)

Sometimes physicians lie to third-party payers in order to grant their patients treatment they would otherwise not receive. This strategy, commonly known as gaming the system, is generally condemned for three reasons. First, it may hurt the patient for the sake of whom gaming was intended. Second, it may hurt other patients. Third, it offends contractual and distributive justice. Hence, gaming is considered to be immoral behavior. This article is an attempt to show that, on the contrary, gaming may sometimes (...) be a physician's duty. Under specific circumstances, gaming may be necessary from the viewpoint of the internal morality of medicine. Moreover, the objections against gaming are examples of what we call the idealistic fallacy, that is, the fallacy of passing judgments in a nonideal world according to ideal standards. Hence, the objections are inconclusive. Gaming is sometimes justified, and may even be required in the name of beneficence. (shrink)

Most people agree that inflicting unnecessary suffering upon animals is wrong. Many fewer people, including among ethicists, agree that painlessly killing animals is necessarily wrong. The most commonly cited reason is that death (without pain, fear, distress) is not bad for them in a way that matters morally, or not as significantly as it does for persons, who are self-conscious, make long-term plans and have preferences about their own future. Animals, at least those that are not persons, lack a morally (...) significant interest in continuing to live. At the same time, some argue that existence itself can be good, insofar as one’s life is worth living. For animals, a good life can offset a quick, if early, death. So, it seems to follow that breeding happy animals that will be (prematurely) killed can be a good thing overall. Insofar as slaughter and sale makes it economically sustainable to raise new ones, who would otherwise not exist, raising and killing animals for food who will have lives worth living is good overall. It benefits them as well as consumers, and makes the world better by adding to the sum of happiness. The process of raising and killing animals with positive welfare produces a sequence of replacement that maintains or increases overall welfare, all else being equal (assuming in particular no overall negative impact on the welfare of other parties). Call this the Replaceability Argument (RA) and the ensuing controversy the Replaceability Problem (RP). This is a problem at the crossroads of the ethics of killing, agricultural ethics, procreation ethics, and population ethics. (shrink)

Recently, swimming-style colour synaesthesia was introduced as a new form of synaesthesia. A synaesthetic Stroop test was used to establish its genuineness. Since Stroop interference can occur for any type of overlearned association, in the present study we used a modified Stroop test and psychophysiological synaesthetic conditioning to further establish the genuineness of this form of synaesthesia. We compared the performance of a swimming-style colour synaesthete and a control who was trained on swimming-style colour associations. Our results showed that behavioural (...) aspects of swimming-style colour synaesthesia can be mimicked in a trained control. Importantly, however, our results showed a psychophysiological conditioning effect for the synaesthete only. We discuss the theoretical relevance of swimming-style colour synaesthesia according to different models of synaesthesia. We conclude that swimming-style colour synaesthesia is a genuine form of synaesthesia, can be mimicked behaviourally in non-synaesthetes, and is best explained by a re-entrant feedback model. (shrink)

Il est assez commun de se représenter le bûcheron comme un être plutôt fruste, qualifié avant tout par sa force au service d’une tâche peu valorisée. Or cette représentation se révèle tronquée, car l’équation qui associe la force à l’outil ne peut se réaliser sans le contrôle du geste. Plus encore, l’écoute des témoignages recueillis auprès des forestiers nous apprend que ce travail réclame d’efficaces systèmes de précision. C’est là une qualification oubliée, pourtant reconnue à part entière dès l’Iliade, qui (...) nous en donne deux témoins privilégiés par l’anthropologie historique de la Grèce, la mètis, l’« intelligence rusée », prêtée au kybérnêtês, le pilote du navire, au conducteur de char et, en bonne première place, au bûcheron. La théorie du contrôle nous permet maintenant de dépasser le flou conceptuel de la notion historiquement pré-théorique de mètis, la ruse s’appliquant à des cas bien trop divers, pour lui préférer les développements les plus récents d’une science du contrôle de l’action, théorisée depuis Wiener, nourrissant aujourd’hui les projets les mieux financés de cyber-cerveaux informatiques, au service des neurosciences et de la médecine. Le travail forestier, qui réclame une coordination maîtrisée des gestes, y compris de leurs commandes vocales dans le chant de travail — qu’un seul ou plusieurs bûcherons en équipe soient mobilisés —, nous en fournit une parfaite illustration. The woodcutter is commonly represented as a fairly boorish person, reduced to brute force and low-level tasks. But this representation is partial because a simplistic inferential link between an axe and strength obliterates that nothing can happen without any modus operandi, i.e. a set of neural controls over gestures. Indeed, listening to woodcutter’s testimonies led us to elicit that this work needs efficient precision systems. This high level of qualification was acknowledged at least since Homer’s Iliad as evidenced by two favourite telltales from historical anthropology of Ancient Greece: mètis ascribed to kybérnêtês, the ship’s pilot as to the chariot-driver and in the first rank to the woodcutter. Control theory allows now to avoid the fuzziness of meaning of the pre-theoretical notion of mètis to focus on a domain steadily developed since Wiener, now part of costly cyber-brain projects in informatics, for neuroscience and medicine. Forest work, which requires skilled gesture coordination, with vocal commands in a worksong—for one or more woodcutters being engaged in the task—is such a telling case. (shrink)

C’est à coup sûr un document hors du commun que Mélanie Traversier a mis à la disposition des historiens. La reine Marie-Caroline de Naples est bien connue des spécialistes de l’Italie méridionale et de l’ère napoléonienne comme une souveraine qui a eu vocation à se mêler de politique : à vrai dire, si les circonstances y ont aidé (Charles III de Bourbon étant passé en Espagne, la couronne de Naples échut à Ferdinand, qu’elle avait épousé en 1767 et qui n’avait (...) aucune disposition pour un méti... (shrink)

La noción de carne, perteneciente a la última etapa del pensamiento de Merleau-Ponty, ocupa un lugar determinante en las investigaciones especializadas sobre el autor. Sin embargo, en escasas publicaciones se destaca la inmensa influencia de esta última en el pensamiento actual, especialmente en las corrientes posthumanistas y materialistas de la contemporaneidad filosófica. Nos proponemos, en las páginas que siguen, analizar dicha categoría desde el punto de vista de una filosofía de la relación, interpretándola desde la figura de la medialidad o (...) emparentándola a una noción de medio. Para esto, en la primera parte, se dilucidará la noción merleau-pontiana de medio en _Fenomenología de la percepción_ y la postulación de la experiencia como punto de partida. En la segunda, se explicitarán las múltiples dimensiones en las cuales se despliega la noción de carne en la filosofía tardía del autor. Una vez abordados los aspectos epistemológico, fenomenológico y ontológico de la ontología de la carne se analizará su potencial filosófico proyectando los tratamientos a la problemática de la naturaleza, cuestión que consideramos de vital importancia para las reflexiones filosóficas actuales. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous essayons de trouver une définition qui puisse s’appliquer à toutes les peines d’emprisonnement en prenant pour fil conducteur les caractéristiques saillantes d’une peine d’emprisonnement typique aujourd’hui en France. Nous critiquons la définition courante en termes de privation de liberté et nous soutenons que l’emprisonnement pénal se compose universellement d’au moins quatre ingrédients : l’enfermement, l’infraction, le tribunal et la réprobation. Nous expliquons en quoi cette définition peut nous aider à distinguer la peine d’emprisonnement d’autres formes d’enfermement (...) tout en soulignant qu’elle ne supprime pas l’existence de cas limites. (shrink)

En este artículo se exponen, previa presentación de algunas consideraciones iniciales sobre el pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano, las características y fundamentos principales de la historia de las ideas filosóficas latinoamericanas como un marco adecuado para pensar nuestros problemas propios. A propósito de esta disciplina filosófica, su justificación y su vigencia, se presentan algunas críticas hechas a esta tradición de pensamiento desde la filosofía posmoderna y contemporánea, las cuales han puesto de presente entre nosotros algunos pensadores colombianos. Culmina con la consideración de (...) esta historiografía como un método filosófico “nuestroamericano”. (shrink)

The picture of moral development defended by followers of Aristotle takes moral cultivation to be like playing a harp; one gets to be good by actually spending time playing a real instrument. On this view, we cultivate a virtue by doing the actions associated with that virtue. I argue that this picture is inadequate and must be supplemented by imaginative techniques. One can, and sometimes must, cultivate virtue without actually performing the associated actions. Drawing on strands in Buddhist philosophy, I (...) explain several methods of moral development that rely on imagination and visualization rather than overt action. These techniques are essential in cases where cultivating virtue the way one practices the harp is impossible. In particular, I focus on single-event virtues, first-time virtuous acts, and morally dangerous situations. (shrink)

The relatively recent increase in prominence of computer simulations in scientific inquiry gives us more reasons than ever before for asserting that mathematics is a wonderful tool. In fact, a practical knowledge of scientific computation has become essential for scientists working in all disciplines involving mathematics. Despite their incontestable success, it must be emphasized that the numerical methods subtending simulations provide at best approximate solutions and that they can also return very misleading results. Accordingly, epistemological sobriety demands that we clarify (...) the circumstances under which simulations can be relied upon. With this in mind, this paper articulates a general perspective to better understand and compare the strengths and weaknesses of various error-analysis methods. (shrink)

Simonet, Emanuel Nicolas Cortes Atul Gawande's book Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End, draws upon both anecdotal stories and literary sources to highlight the importance of honest discussions as the end of life approaches. These discussions are particularly significant for older persons and terminally ill patients. Gawande believes that these discussions could be facilitated by more in-depth and focussed communication between the healthcare professional and the patient. Respecting the patient's values and priorities, and promoting a (...) sense of wellbeing and dignity are critical for quality care. (shrink)

Many of us, even on our happiest days, struggle to quiet the constant buzz of anxiety in the background of our minds. All kinds of worries--worries about losing people and things, worries about how we seem to others--keep us from peace of mind. Distracted or misled by our preoccupations, misconceptions, and, most of all, our obsession with ourselves, we don't see the world clearly--we don't see the world as it really is. In our search for happiness and the good life, (...) this is the main problem. But luckily there is a solution, and on the path to understanding it, we can make use of the rich and varied teachings that have developed over centuries of Buddhist thought. With clarity and compassion, Nicolas Bommarito explores the central elements of centuries of Buddhist philosophy and practice, explaining how they can improve your life and teach you to live without fear. Mining important texts and lessons for practical guidance, he provides a friendly guide to the very practical goals that underpin Buddhist philosophy. After laying out the basic ideas, Bommarito walks readers through a wide range of techniques and practices we can adopt to mend ingrained habits. Rare for its exploration of both the philosophy that motivates Buddhism and its practical applications, this is a compassionate guide to leading a good life that anyone can follow. (shrink)

In the literature on medical ethics, it is generally admitted that vulnerable persons or groups deserve special attention, care or protection. One can define vulnerable persons as those having a greater likelihood of being wronged – that is, of being denied adequate satisfaction of certain legitimate claims. The conjunction of these two points entails what we call the Special Protection Thesis. It asserts that persons with a greater likelihood of being denied adequate satisfaction of their legitimate claims deserve special attention, (...) care or protection. Such a thesis remains vague, however, as long as we do not know what legitimate claims are. This article aims at dispelling this vagueness by exploring what claims we have in relation to health care – thus fleshing out a claim-based conception of vulnerability. We argue that the Special Protection Thesis must be enriched as follows: If individual or group X has a greater likelihood of being denied adequate satisfaction of some of their legitimate claims to physical integrity, autonomy, freedom, social provision, impartial quality of government, social bases of self-respect or communal belonging, then X deserves special attention, care or protection. With this improved understanding of vulnerability, vulnerability talk in healthcare ethics can escape vagueness and serve as an adequate basis for practice. (shrink)

In Time Deposits, Dimension, and Fraud (2009), William Barnett and Walter Block argue that by borrowing short and lending long there is an over issuance of property rights. Their article, however, does not fully extend the consequences of their contribution. Once this is done, it becomes clearer that their argument suits a great impediment to banking, becoming a possible reason to support rather than to oppose fractional reserve banking. Bagus and Howden (J Bus Ethics 90(3):399–406, 2009) comment on Barnett and (...) Block (J Bus Ethics 88(4):711–716, 2009), the authors claim that while maintaining the illegitimacy of fractional reserve deposits, borrowing short and lending long it is actually not illegitimate. An extension on Bagus and Howden (2009) will show that their line of argumentation can be applied as a defense of fractional reserve banking as well. (shrink)

The belief in immanent justice is the expectation that the universe is designed to ensure that evil is punished and virtue rewarded. What makes this belief so ‘natural’? Here, we suggest that this intuition of immanent justice derives from our evolved sense of fairness. In cases where a misdeed is followed by a misfortune, our sense of fairness construes the misfortune as a way to compensate for the misdeed. To test this hypothesis, we designed a set of studies in which (...) we show that people who do not believe in immanent justice are nonetheless implicitly influenced by intuitions of immanent justice. Strikingly, this effect disappears when the misfortune is disproportionate compared to the misdeed: In this case, justice is not restored and participants lose the intuition of immanent justice. Following recent theories of religion, we suggest that this intuition contributes to the cultural success of beliefs in immanent justice. (shrink)

Syllogisms (e.g. “All A are B; All B are C; What is true about A and C?”) are a long‐studied area of human reasoning. Riesterer, Brand, and Ragni compare a variety of models to human performance and show that not only do current models have a lot of room for improvement, but more importantly a large part of this improvement must come from examining individual differences in performance.

Synaesthesia is a heterogeneous phenomenon, even when considering one particular sub-type. The purpose of this study was to design a reliable and valid questionnaire for grapheme-colour synaesthesia that captures this heterogeneity. By the means of a large sample of 628 synaesthetes and a factor analysis, we created the Coloured Letters and Numbers questionnaire with 16 items loading on 4 different factors . These factors were externally validated with tests which are widely used in the field of synaesthesia research. The questionnaire (...) showed good test–retest reliability and construct validity . Our findings are discussed in the light of current theories and new ideas in synaesthesia research. More generally, the questionnaire is a useful tool which can be widely used in synaesthesia research to reveal the influence of individual differences on various performance measures and will be useful in generating new hypotheses. (shrink)

The elimination of subjectivity through brain research and the replacement of so-called ‘folk psychology’ by a neuroscientifically enlightened worldview and self-conception has been both hoped for and feared. But this cultural revolution is still pending. Based on nine months of fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research since the ‘Decade of the Brain,’ this paper examines how subjective experience appears as epistemic object and practical problem in a psychopharmacological laboratory. In the quest for neural correlates of (drug-induced altered states of) (...) consciousness, introspective accounts of test subjects play a crucial role in neuroimaging studies. Firsthand knowledge of the drugs’ flamboyant effects provides researchers with a personal knowledge not communicated in scientific publications, but key to the conduct of their experiments. In many cases, the ‘psychedelic experience’ draws scientists into the field and continues to inspire their self-image and way of life. By exploring these domains the paper points to a persistence of the subjective in contemporary neuropsychopharmacology. (shrink)

Critics of the target article objected to our account of art appreciators' sensitivity to art-historical contexts and functions, the relations among the modes of artistic appreciation, and the weaknesses of aesthetic science. To rebut these objections and justify our program, we argue that the current neglect of sensitivity to art-historical contexts persists as a result of a pervasive aesthetic–artistic confound; we further specify our claim that basic exposure and the design stance are necessary conditions of artistic understanding; and we explain (...) why many experimental studies do not belong to a psycho-historical science of art. (shrink)

Based on anthropological fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research as well as on the epistemic culture of neurophilosophy, this Common Knowledge guest column examines two very different philosophical engagements with psychedelic drugs. In Thomas Metzinger's evidence-based philosophy of mind, hallucinogens help to operationalize questions about the nature of consciousness. While this project contributes to the great divide between empirically enlightened moderns and tradition-oriented premoderns, Metzinger's neurophilosophical reanimation of the ancient conception of philosophy as cultura animi can build a bridge (...) to Aldous Huxley's perennial philosophy, which has informed the psychedelic intelligentsia like no other body of thought. In the sixteenth century, the philosophia perennis grew out of a decidedly nonmodern philosophy of religion that sought to suture the historical and cultural cracks that would come to define modernity. This essay argues that neurophilosophy and ethnographic studies of consciousness cultures could function as critical correctives in a contemporary rearticulation of perennial philosophy. (shrink)

This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the (...) relation between object- and agent-tracking are distinguished: the Independence, Deflationary and Organism-Dependence Views. The correct view is argued to be the latter, which states that perceptual and epistemic tracking of a unique human organism requires tracking both its spatio-temporal object-properties and its agent-properties. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est consacre a l'etude de la distinction linguistique entre noms massifs (lait, mobilier, desordre, amour...) et noms comptables (chat, equipe, combat, chose...). Les premiers sont normalement invariables, tandis que les seconds s'emploient librement au singulier et au pluriel. Apres avoir etabli qu'il s'agit bien d'une distinction morpho-syntaxique, l'ouvrage discute la possibilite de caracteriser semantiquement cette distinction. Les recherches existantes ne tiennent compte, essentiellement, que des noms s'appliquant au domaine materiel. Ce travail, au contraire, examine en detail aussi bien (...) les noms concrets qu'abstraits. Il propose de redefinir les proprietes souvent attribuees aux noms massifs (references distributive et cumulative), grace, notamment, a une nouvelle notion de partie. Concernant les noms comptables, il montre qu'aucune propriete purement semantique n'est necessaire pour qu'un nom soit de ce type. L'ouvrage se termine par l'analyse des conversions (emplois massifs des noms comptables, et vice versa), et du role qu'y jouent les facteurs pragmatiques. (shrink)

Simonet, Emanuel Nicolas Cortes Advance care planning is a significant and important process of end-of-life care. It provides the opportunity for persons to express their medical treatment preferences prior to losing the capacity to decide for themselves. It also allows for the appointment of substituted decision maker to make medical decisions for persons who have lost capacity. Whilst advance care planning can be beneficial when it is used effectively, the legislative framework surrounding advance care planning is complex and confusing. (...) This brief article will summarise advance care planning, its current legislative framework in Victoria and how proposed recommendations offered by the Inquiry into end of life choices may simplify advance care planning. (shrink)

In this article I argue for the continuity of Sartre's theory of alienation. Therefore, I will depict how the concept of 'alienation' is further developed by Sartre since his early writings, by discussing the different forms of alienation in his late oeuvre and in his works on moral philosophy. First, I will take up the differenciation of individual and social alienation and, furthermore, I will discuss Sartre's radicalized form of alienation, which is beyond pure forms of exploitation or recurrence and (...) was not discussed in the literature, yet. I will connect Sartres theory of value in his "L'Être et le Néant" with the theory of alienation in his "Cahiers pour une Moral" and the "Critique de la Raison dialectique". (shrink)

Creating an integrated design space can be successful only if researchers agree on how to define and measure a certain phenomenon of interest. Adversarial collaborations and mathematical modeling can aid in reaching the necessary level of agreement when researchers depart from different theoretical perspectives.

To introduce the issue of the tracking and identification of human agents, I examine the ability of an agent to track a human person and distinguish this target from other individuals: The ability to perform person identification. First, I discuss influential mechanistic models of the perceptual recognition of human faces and people. Such models propose detailed hypotheses about the parts and activities of the mental mechanisms that control the perceptual recognition of persons. However, models based on perceptual recognition are incomplete (...) theories of person identification because they do not explain several identification behaviors that are fundamental to human social interactions. Furthermore, recognition-based models tend to appeal to the controversial concept of the “identity” of a person without explaining what determines personal identity and persistence. To overcome these limitations, I propose to integrate the face-recognition program into a broader causal-historical theory of identification. The causal-historical theory of identification complements models focused on perceptual recognition because it can account for the types of non-perceptual identification overlooked by the face-recognition program. Moreover, it can decompose the identification behaviors into tracking processes that succeed or fail to be sensitive to causal characteristics of a target. I illustrate these advantages with a discussion of the difference between the tracking of a person understood as either a causally continuous biological organism or a psychologically continuous mind. Finally, I argue that the causal-historical theory provides a theoretical framework for investigating the tracking of relations between a target and its contextual and historical attributes, such as a target's possessions. (shrink)